This DIY Goo Gone Is a Totally Natural Way to Get Pesky Stickers Off New Dishes

We recently ran a story about the best way to get stickers off new dishes. One surefire way to do it is with Goo Gone, a product I’ve used myself on many a photo shoot to get dishes and decorative items (like lamps and tchotkes) photo-ready when they had sales tags on them. But when we read through your comments, there was a common complaint: Lots of people hate the smell, and sometimes it leaves a petroleum-y residue on surfaces. A few of you worried about using a product that smelled so strongly on surfaces you might use for cooking and dining.

We get it! So we hunted around for an alternative.

A few people suggested using kitchen oils, and I myself have used baby oil and Avon’s Skin-So-Soft in sticky situations before (ha, ha), but neither of those are in my kitchen, so I turned to my handiest oil: olive oil.

Like most oils and fats, olive oil will dissolve the adhesive holding the sticker to your dishes (coconut oil or canola oil would work, too). Then the next thing you need is a scrubber. One of my go-to abrasives is baking soda, because it’s fine enough to detach debris, but not so abrasive that you’ll end up ruining the surface you’re trying to clean up. Combine the two, and you have an all-natural goo remover made from items right in your pantry, that won’t damage your delicate dishes.

I tried it out on some plates I found at Marshalls. They each had some very sticky stickers that wouldn’t come off with my fingernail. So I poured about 1 tablespoon of oil into a bowl, added in a 1/2 tablespoon of baking soda, and mixed it up. Then I rubbed the mixture onto the stickers. In some cases, the stickers came off in one big piece and then I just had to scrape the glue off. In other cases, the sticker rubbed off in shreds (why are all these stickers so different?) but one thing was consistent: the stickers always came off. In less than a minute, too!

If you need more of the solution, just scale it up using the same ratio as above (1 tablespoon oil to 1/2 tablespoon baking soda).

I washed each plate with dish soap and they came out totally clean. I even tried this method on an antique brass bowl I found at an estate sale and it worked on that too. This mixture has just enough stuff to dislodge the adhesive without harming the surface of whatever I’m cleaning. And, again, it’s made with stuff in my pantry!

Have you ever tried this? Do you have another method you swear by?